Another Company Looks to Factory Prefab Home Business

More companies are looking at modular and pre-fab home construction, setting up factories to create units. Another firm in the field is Onx Homes.

The company, founded in 2021, says that using a collection of technologies that it calls X+ Construction, it can build housing in less than 60 days, faster than what it says is an industry average of six to nine months. Onx says that its construction portfolio currently includes more than 5,000 “newly developed homes across Florida and Texas.”

Some of the in-house technologies is a pod configurator, which doesn’t require lifting hooks or external handling abrasions. “Fully automated, it is free of manual errors, achieving the necessary strength in just 6 hours,” the company’s website says.

Rebar production has all the parts “to eliminate inventory waste and facilitate a smooth, efficient process.” In theory, this should work by reducing variations that should also help lead to fewer exceptions and errors. Use of rebar also means concrete-based construction, which is “four times better at resisting fire than wood frame walls and exhibits better resistance to 100 mph tornados than wood or steel.

“Onx dual-layer precast concrete walls are made to achieve a high strength of 6000 psi,” the company says. “The concrete mix is poured into reusable molds that are adjusted to the required specification, then configured into sandwiched panels that provide a greater thermal gradient than solid panels of equal thickness.” The company claims that the panels should withstand 175 mph wind loads.

Insulation comes from a third-party that manufactures it from plant-based materials, using sandwich panels.

One consideration is that while Onx says rebar-reinforced high-strength concrete can last 75 or more years but says the pod-produced units have a lifecycle of 50-plus years. Its PR materials say home integrity is guaranteed for 50-plus years.

GlobeSt.com ran an analysis of Census Bureau estimations of numbers of housing units and the construction date and then used a cut-off of 1969, meaning at least 54 years old, to enable an estimation of older ones. For detached homes, the in this older category is 43.1% of all detached built through 2021 is 43.1%, and of all total housing units of all types, 27.4%. For attached, it was 52.1%/3.3%. For 2-to-4 units, 74.3%/4.9%. For 5-to-9 units, 65.7%/2.8%; 10-to-19 units, 55.1%/3.0%; 20-to-49, 74.0%/2.6%; and 50 or more, 62.4%/3.1%. That doesn’t count some other types of housing like manufactured, boat, RV, or van.

Overall, 47.1% U.S. housing stock is very old, with a 50-plus year guarantee not close to the types of lifespans historically expected. This raises a bigger question of how many modular or pre-fab construction approaches have the lifespans the country has come to take for granted.